Silicon Valley Tours

"Optimism is an essential ingredient of innovation. How else can the individual welcome change over security, adventure over staying in safe places?" - Robert Norton Noyce - "the Mayor of Silicon Valley"

Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University. Together they own about 16 percent of its shares. They incorporated Google as a privately held company on September 4, 1998.

The Stanford university campus was listed by Travel+Leisure in September 2011 as one of the most beautiful campuses in the United States and by MSN as one of the most beautiful college campuses in the world.

As a technologist, Robert Noyce was the co-inventor of the integrated circuit and held numerous patents. As an entrepreneur, he was a co-founder of both Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel Corporation. He flew planes, sang madrigals, and skied treacherous slopes. He was a tinkerer, an athlete, a husband and father, and a true visionary.

The NASA Ames Exploration Center is a science museum and education center for NASA. There are displays and interactive exhibits about NASA technology, missions and space exploration. A moon rock, meteorite and other geologic samples are on display.

Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley is different. It’s the big corporations that act as Silicon Valley’s engines; the universities which are feeders of intellectual capital; the venture capital, angel, and legal infrastructure; the sunny and warm weather; the influx of driven and entrepreneurial immigrants; the culture of starting companies and failing; and the inspiration of people following dreams to change the world.

Outsiders forget that Silicon Valley is not powered by startups, but some big engines, that is, multi-national technology companies with tens of billions of dollars in revenue. This includes Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Google, Cisco Systems, Oracle, Intel, Gilead Sciences, eBay, Franklin Resources, Yahoo, Tesla, to name a few. It has a broad range of industry engaged in electronics, power engineering, computing, and communications — all on the leading edge of research.

Although semiconductors are still a major component of the area’s economy, Silicon Valley has been most famous in recent years for innovations in software and Internet services. Silicon Valley has significantly influenced computer operating systems, software, and user interfaces.

The biggest industries are computer software and hardware, then biotech, then business services.

A PARTIAL LIST OF THINGS TO SEE

You could visit them all.

Computer History Museum

The Computer History Museum is a museum established in 1996 in Mountain View, California, USA. The Museum is dedicated to preserving and presenting the stories and artifacts of the information age, and exploring the computing revolution and its impact on society.

The Computer History Museum claims to house the largest and most significant collection of computing artifacts in the world.

The museum’s 25,000-square-foot exhibition “Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing,” opened to the public on January 13, 2011. It covers the history of computing in 20 galleries, from the abacus to the Internet.

The museum has several additional exhibits, including a Difference Engine designed by Charles Babbage in the 1840s and constructed by the Science Museum, a restoration of a historic PDP-1 minicomputer, and a new exhibit on Google Street View and the history of “surrogate travel.”